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Good Karma To Lease 880; WCBS News Programming To End
- Thread starter lanceventa
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I just posed the question again. The different categories in advertising are not broken out as separate lines on the balance sheet.
How did the Mets licensing cost affect the balance sheet if the total revenues stayed the same, with the Mets versus without the Mets?
I've been on this board for 21 years and make about 20 posts a year. One of the reasons why I focus on quality over quantity is I spend most of my waking hours focused on my successful career. I look at revenue figures all day every day and I'm known as "a fixer." I'm not saying that I could fix WCBS - the broad industry trends were likely fatal eventually, but not necessarily fatal today.
That said, there have now been multiple posters in this thread asserting that the ad revenues were being propped up by sports (ie The Mets).
No one can answer how the if the revenues stayed the same with the Mets versus without the Mets, trending exactly the same versus the comp stations (ie down about 25-30% 2018 to 2023), that the station was better off with The Mets (and its assorted costs) versus just doing bread and butter news and earning the same revenue.
What you don't know is how far they would have declined WITHOUT the Mets. There was a reason why they added the Yankees and later the Mets. And why they chose WCBS for sports and not WINS. If you can get the answer to that question, it might help you with this one. The other thing we don't know is how bad the WINS simulcast hurt WCBS. We can see it in 6+ numbers, but we really can't see the demos.
Correct - that is a big unknown. But you can make an inference from that by looking at the revenue changes for all the peer stations.
What you can't do is say "their ad revenues were propped up by sports" because that's clearly not the case.
With The Mets or Without The Mets.
Was the income statement better With The Mets or Without The Mets.
If you're going to make the claim you've made repeatedly, you better be able to make the case that the income statement is better With the Mets.
You haven't done so.
Unless you have the financial statement, you don't know either. Everyone here is playing guessing games and arguing about it. KMan asks good questions but the deal is sealed. Even if you did have the answers, which you don't, it wouldn't change anything.
Let's put it this way: I know enough about selling sports radio (as I explained in post 224) that I can say a big chunk came from sports.
Neither you nor I have an income statement. All either of us have is BIA, which as I said is a total revenue number.
You're saying that revenue stayed the same as audience size was dropping like a stone. Explain that to me.
WCBS 880 Gets Three hours to celebrate 57 Years of Greatness? Even PLJ got a number of Days before they signed off
Huh I dunno, maybe it had something to do with WINS getting an FM simulcast and WCBS was stuck on 880? That's a great way to kill off a format and not even the vaunted Mets could save them.
Revenue didn't go up when the Mets contract started.
Was the income statement better The Mets or Without The Mets. If you can't answer that, you shouldn't make assertions as fact.
Critical point.
And while the Mets certainly brought listeners to the station, I have to wonder how many regular WCBS drive time listeners became frustrated that for half the year, PM drive news was pre-empted.
For the last two years, there's this other station on better quality FM that always had news during the PM drive. And AM drive. And weekends. If your brand is all news but you only have news reliably half the day, your value proposition gets pretty questionable.
This isn't true. In the months just before WINS-FM began on 92.3 MHz, WCBS beat WINS in the ratings a couple of months. It probably helped that the Mets were having a good year. Most of the time, WINS 1010 had better ratings than WCBS 880. But a win is a win.
And when it came to billing, before WINS got the FM simulcast, it was only slightly ahead of WCBS. You may remember, WINS, WFAN and WCBS would all finish around #8, #9 and #10 in the annual BIA list of top billing stations. WOR, when it had the Mets, never had billing anywhere near putting it among top billing stations. So it couldn't be the Mets that were doing most of the heavy lifting. Advertisers who had nothing to do with the Mets were buying enough spots on WCBS, hawking their products on this all-news station, that made WCBS a top billing station, even if its ratings weren't great.
Audacy is blowing up a station billing $29 million a year so Good Karma can pay it maybe $6 million a year to lease the signal? Good Karma didn't want to pay Emmis $12 million a year to lease 98.7 FM. But the company is willing to pay around $6 million annually for 880, an AM station? That's a deal that Audacy can't resist?
Same thing with newspapers-- long, long ago, 25 cents would get you a fairly-decent paper that had a good and plenty of content from all areas of news (national, international, state, local, business, sports, entertainment, the works), and 50 or 75 (possibly $1) would get you an even better helping on Sundays. Now in this day and age of devices, it takes $3.50 to $4 to get a bastardized USA Today-style daily in Gannett markets (of which there are far too many), and $5 on Sundays (and these bastardized ones talk about the same things over and over and over again, even when those topics have been done to death; quite a few have no opinion pages either).
Any practical assessment would say it did nothing but hurt WCBS and made zero effort to help the all-news format's viability to the money demo. If you're relying on the freaking Mets, a team that somehow managed to lose their radio network due to disinterest at the team level, then you simply have no future.
There's a difference between saying "the figures I have seen are confidential" and "you don't have to see the figures, just trust me on this".
WCBS is the classic example of a newspaper failing because they never switched from afternoons to mornings where the more visible morning paper siphoned off subscribers and revenue. It never kept up with the times because ownership didn't care.
By remaining on AM and needlessly drifting from the format (Mets, weekend infomercials) just to make a few meager extra bucks, WCBS was headed for nothing but extinction.
Being a map guy who mentally maps traffic reports for fun (I live and work nowhere near where I need them for my commuting)
, I join in that bit of mourning.
It definitely is true. Nielsen Audio ratings are notoriously noisy, and cherry picking a month or two doesn't change a long term trend.
I don't have every month's data for NYC, but I'd generalize that WINS averaged 30% more share than WCBS over the course of 10 years prior to WINS-FM launching.
In addition to paying for an all-news staff, WCBS also had to pay for the Mets. In order to reach the same profit margin as WINS, they would have needed to bill several million more than WINS, not a couple million less.
That was the case when WCBS had Dah Yankees. In 2013, WCBS billed $5 million more than WINS. In 2023, WINS-FM led by $11 million.
The Mets are a significant portion of WCBS's revenue, but nowhere close to a majority. Even though baseball is a long season, the Mets will be on the air for only around 8% of the hours in a year.
Some in this thread are talking like WCBS is billing $15 million during the Mets and $15 million the whole rest of the year, and that is a fantasy.
I don't think we know the exact price of the lease yet. I speculated a number.
The difference is that Audacy's expenses for operating WHSQ will be nearly zero, so meaningfully all of the lease will be profit. What that tells us is that Newsradio WCBS was clearing less than that number.
Audacy has done some dumb things, but they're not dumb enough to trade a Newsradio format profiting $10 million for a lease profiting $3.5 million.
It's definitely not a lease that profits $12 million. And then there's the Mets contract they still have to pay and produce for Good Karma to air.
And yet revenue didn't drop. In fact WCBS went from #11 in 2022 (the year the WINS simulcast began) in BIA revenue to #10 in 2023. So while the revenue amount was unchanged, the station moved up ahead of other stations in rank. At a time when the entire industry was going through an advertising drop of about 5% that ultimately pushed Audacy into bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, you say WCBS was "stuck on 880." The audience for news was addressed and satisfied by shutting down alternative rock and replacing it with a news simulcast. But that's not enough for the over-65 demo that has been demanding Audacy blow up another FM so the boomers can enjoy format duplication (in this case format quadruplication) at the expense of formats that attract younger demos.
I used to get and sometimes watch the news on WGAL(TV) Lancaster, PA, back when WGAL's main meterorologist was Doug Allen, who's no longer there according to WGAL's website, and whose name I always thought of as a mashup of two other telly wx guys: DC's "one and only Channel 9"'s Doug Hill and the aforementioned Craig Allen. Get it?
So rather than address my question, you're going to insist I produce information that's confidential and unavailable to anyone. Fine. I don't care. I can make whatever assertions I want, and you can deal with them however you want. Media analysts make assertions without income statements all the time, and I expect to see some today on this story.
What we can see is that income was better with the Mets than it would have been without them. The audience for news was dropping, the advertising for news product was declining, and had to be replaced. All this was happening at a time when revenue for the company and the industry overall was way down.
Baseball games usually begin at 7PM. That's not "drive time." Meanwhile WCBS continued to staff and run its regular news product on the station's streaming channel. So they didn't save any money in staffing during the baseball broadcasts. But putting news product on a stream doesn't satisfy the boomers who demand format duplication for free, and resent the weekend infomercials that disrupt their regular routine.
And yet, with all of that, revenues STAYED THE SAME, and comparably increased when compared to other stations in the same situation according to BIA. WCBS went from #11 to #10 in the revenue rankings. How could that be? You won't answer that. You keep demanding income statements. It won't change a thing. The decision has been made, the station will go away, and the boomers will have to listen to WINS to get their news. Too bad.
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